Denotatively: in your two hypothetical worlds, one of the statements may be false but all three are presenting essentially the same information, which is “I think the sky is blue”. You’re unlikely to say “I think the sky is blue but the sky is green”, or “it is rational to believe the sky is blue but I think the sky is green”.
Connotatively: I do think there’s a connotative difference between the statements. “I think the sky is blue” assigns less probability to a blue sky than “the sky is blue” does; and “it is rational to believe X” could mean something like “I ought to disbelieve in ghosts, but I’ll still run screaming from a supposedly-haunted building”, or “it is rational (for children) to believe in God (because they don’t have any other explanation for religion)”, or “the current best hypothesis is that the Higgs boson exists, but we’ve got an LHC to run before we can collect actual data”.
You’re unlikely to say “I think the sky is blue but the sky is green”, or “it is rational to believe the sky is blue but I think the sky is green”.
And yet, I am not-infrequently in a state where saying “I think I’m going to do really badly on this project, but the truth is I probably won’t” seems to make perfect sense to me, as does “it is rational to believe I’ll do well on this project but the truth is I think I won’t.”
This does not surprise me too much, as I don’t expect my brain to be internally consistent, and I consider all thoughts it thinks my thoughts because the alternative seems more dissociative than necessary. Depression and anxiety frequently cause me to think things that contradict my rationally endorsed beliefs.
I don’t expect my brain to be internally consistent, and I consider all thoughts it thinks my thoughts because the alternative seems more dissociative than necessary
What does it mean to consider these thoughts “your” thoughts, what does this ownership signify? Your brain produced them; what else is there to say? Endorsement of correctness doesn’t need to relate to personal identity.
What it means to consider these thoughts my thoughts is more or less the same thing that it means to consider these fingers I’m typing with my fingers, or the words I’ve typed my words. I assume you’re not asking me to taboo the general concept of ownership here, though I’ll try to if you are, and I don’t think I’m using it in an unusual way.
You said, “I consider all thoughts [my brain] thinks my thoughts because the alternative seems more dissociative than necessary”. In this statement, you seem to be comparing the position where you consider all thoughts “your thoughts” with the position where you only consider some of the thoughts “your thoughts”. In the latter case, you might, for example, declare incorrect aliefs “not part of you”.
My point is that I’m not sure there should be much of a distinction between the concept of endorsing certain thoughts (e.g. for correctness, or for expressing certain values), and the concept of ownership over them. More specifically I’m suggesting that it might be a good idea to get rid of the concept of ownership over thoughts (where it’s selective, so that not every thought your brain thinks is seen as “your own”), and only use the concept of endorsement, so that the question of relating endorsed thoughts with owned thoughts would become trivial/meaningless.
(The idea of endorsement generalizes better to weird situations, as you may endorse something an algorithm running on your computer suggested, something other people think, implementation of a social norm, or something an AI does. It seems that it’s more accurate to treat such things as “part of you” than not, in considerations that would normally make use of the concept of “part of you”, but the concept of “part of you” as it’s normally used fits them worse than the concept of “endorsement”, thus the latter is more useful, and the former is potentially misleading, drawing attention away from such generalizations.)
So, in that context, what it signifies to consider as mine thoughts I don’t endorse is that I consider myself more than just the subset of my brain that thinks thoughts I endorse.
So, why do I do that, rather than only model myself as the subset? Hm. No particularly good reason, I suppose… I mean, I could model myself as just the subset, and treat the thoughts thought by the brain in which I reside as belonging to someone else, or to noone at all. It would take some training, but I expect it’s possible. It’s not something I’ve done, but neither is it something I’ve explicitly rejected.
Do you recommend it? What benefits ought I expect from doing that?
Edit: I should say explicitly that if your answer is “the same benefits EY lists in the posts I linked to,” that’s fine; I just didn’t want to treat his thoughts as yours.
I mean, I could model myself as just the subset, and treat the thoughts thought by the brain in which I reside as belonging to someone else, or to noone at all.
I’m not sure the grandparent clarified the argument then.
Does it mean anything to declare that certain thoughts are “part of you”, apart from your endorsement of those thoughts? In what way is modeling a thought as “your own” different from modeling it as “someone else’s”? One should model what’s possible about one’s whole psychology, and in characterizing that activity I don’t understand in what way “modeling as myself” is distinct from just “modeling”.
You say that you consider more than those thoughts that are endorsed as “part of you”. I don’t understand what this is intended to mean, what is the difference between drawing the boundary of the concept “part of me” in one way vs. the other, and what would it mean to retrain yourself to change this boundary. I expect the valid use of the concept of “part of me” derives mostly from the concept of endorsement, and I’m not sure what the useful distinction might be (there are actual distinctions in connotations, the question is whether they have any role to play).
(I guess I am asking to taboo the concept of ownership, as applied to thinking.)
I guess I am asking to taboo the concept of ownership, as applied to thinking.
Well… OK.
This is tricky to do in abstract terms without becoming entirely meaningless, so let’s take a step back here and see if a more concrete example helps establish a shared useful framework.
In that vein: what does it mean to say that these fingers I’m typing with are mine, rather than to say they aren’t mine?
Well of course there are lots of ways I own my fingers, but in the sense I think we mean here: roughly speaking, it means that when I form impulses to perform certain tasks with my fingers, those are the fingers that perform the tasks, not some other fingers. When those fingers interact with the external world, my mind receives tactile input, not some other mind. And various other facts along those lines. More broadly, it means that these fingers interact with my intentions and my perceptions in various specific ways.
If that stopped being true, I might still refer to them as my fingers, but I wouldn’t mean quite the same thing by doing so. And if it started being true of other fingers that it currently isn’t true of (e.g., fingers on a prosthetic arm connected to my nervous system) I would probably start referring to those fingers as mine in the same sense. (And if it started being true of arbitrary fingers in unpredictable ways, I would probably eventually discard the concept as useless… no fingers would be especially mine, and all fingers might be mine, and it would just be a silly thing to talk about.)
All of which is so banal as to not be worth saying, but perhaps dropping down to the incredibly banal is a useful place to start, since we seem to be missing each other when we get too abstract.
So, OK, does that align with your understanding of ownership as it applies to fingers in this context? (Of course, it is possible to own fingers in many other ways, but that’s what I usually mean when I talk about my fingers.)
Assuming it does… I would say that when I describe certain thoughts as mine, I mean something similar. When I experience the physical symptoms of anxiety, those are the associated anxious thoughts I experience—not anxious thoughts in some other brain. When I form the desire to remember my grandmother’s first name, the subsequent thought of my grandmother’s first name is my thought, not someone else’s. And so forth.
And, much as with fingers, this seems utterly banal and uninteresting. They are my fingers/thoughts, which labels a certain way of interacting causally with those fingers/thoughts as opposed to other fingers/thoughts.
Is that thing which I just described what you understand “my thought” to denote? Is it something you expect derives from the concept of endorsement? If so, can you explain how it does so in your view?
I shall concede that the sentence, “It’s rational for X to believe Y, but really Z” can sometimes make sense—it says that you have different evidence from X. In most cases, though, this will underestimate the power of rationality and ask too little of X. (The last time I can remember saying anything like this was in a strictly fictional context, Chapter 20.)
Isn’t that exactly the question we often ask juries to consider in, for example, liability lawsuits? “It was rational for the defendant to assume (or conclude under the circumstances) X, but in fact not-X, because of Y or because they got really unlucky, and therefore we find them not liable.”
I will happily concede that juries do a poor job accounting for hindsight bias, and hold defendants to low standards of rationality, but it seems to me that the usual question is something like “even though not-X, was it rational to believe X?”
Whether “reasonable” and “rational” really mean the same thing in this case is open, but I submit that it is the same question as whether juries hold defendants to reasonable standards of rationality.
Denotatively: in your two hypothetical worlds, one of the statements may be false but all three are presenting essentially the same information, which is “I think the sky is blue”. You’re unlikely to say “I think the sky is blue but the sky is green”, or “it is rational to believe the sky is blue but I think the sky is green”.
Connotatively: I do think there’s a connotative difference between the statements. “I think the sky is blue” assigns less probability to a blue sky than “the sky is blue” does; and “it is rational to believe X” could mean something like “I ought to disbelieve in ghosts, but I’ll still run screaming from a supposedly-haunted building”, or “it is rational (for children) to believe in God (because they don’t have any other explanation for religion)”, or “the current best hypothesis is that the Higgs boson exists, but we’ve got an LHC to run before we can collect actual data”.
And yet, I am not-infrequently in a state where saying “I think I’m going to do really badly on this project, but the truth is I probably won’t” seems to make perfect sense to me, as does “it is rational to believe I’ll do well on this project but the truth is I think I won’t.”
This does not surprise me too much, as I don’t expect my brain to be internally consistent, and I consider all thoughts it thinks my thoughts because the alternative seems more dissociative than necessary. Depression and anxiety frequently cause me to think things that contradict my rationally endorsed beliefs.
What does it mean to consider these thoughts “your” thoughts, what does this ownership signify? Your brain produced them; what else is there to say? Endorsement of correctness doesn’t need to relate to personal identity.
I’m puzzled by the question.
What it means to consider these thoughts my thoughts is more or less the same thing that it means to consider these fingers I’m typing with my fingers, or the words I’ve typed my words. I assume you’re not asking me to taboo the general concept of ownership here, though I’ll try to if you are, and I don’t think I’m using it in an unusual way.
But I’m not quite sure what you are asking.
Can you clarify?
You said, “I consider all thoughts [my brain] thinks my thoughts because the alternative seems more dissociative than necessary”. In this statement, you seem to be comparing the position where you consider all thoughts “your thoughts” with the position where you only consider some of the thoughts “your thoughts”. In the latter case, you might, for example, declare incorrect aliefs “not part of you”.
My point is that I’m not sure there should be much of a distinction between the concept of endorsing certain thoughts (e.g. for correctness, or for expressing certain values), and the concept of ownership over them. More specifically I’m suggesting that it might be a good idea to get rid of the concept of ownership over thoughts (where it’s selective, so that not every thought your brain thinks is seen as “your own”), and only use the concept of endorsement, so that the question of relating endorsed thoughts with owned thoughts would become trivial/meaningless.
(The idea of endorsement generalizes better to weird situations, as you may endorse something an algorithm running on your computer suggested, something other people think, implementation of a social norm, or something an AI does. It seems that it’s more accurate to treat such things as “part of you” than not, in considerations that would normally make use of the concept of “part of you”, but the concept of “part of you” as it’s normally used fits them worse than the concept of “endorsement”, thus the latter is more useful, and the former is potentially misleading, drawing attention away from such generalizations.)
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.
So, in that context, what it signifies to consider as mine thoughts I don’t endorse is that I consider myself more than just the subset of my brain that thinks thoughts I endorse.
So, why do I do that, rather than only model myself as the subset? Hm. No particularly good reason, I suppose… I mean, I could model myself as just the subset, and treat the thoughts thought by the brain in which I reside as belonging to someone else, or to noone at all. It would take some training, but I expect it’s possible. It’s not something I’ve done, but neither is it something I’ve explicitly rejected.
Do you recommend it?
What benefits ought I expect from doing that?
Edit: I should say explicitly that if your answer is “the same benefits EY lists in the posts I linked to,” that’s fine; I just didn’t want to treat his thoughts as yours.
I’m not sure the grandparent clarified the argument then.
Does it mean anything to declare that certain thoughts are “part of you”, apart from your endorsement of those thoughts? In what way is modeling a thought as “your own” different from modeling it as “someone else’s”? One should model what’s possible about one’s whole psychology, and in characterizing that activity I don’t understand in what way “modeling as myself” is distinct from just “modeling”.
You say that you consider more than those thoughts that are endorsed as “part of you”. I don’t understand what this is intended to mean, what is the difference between drawing the boundary of the concept “part of me” in one way vs. the other, and what would it mean to retrain yourself to change this boundary. I expect the valid use of the concept of “part of me” derives mostly from the concept of endorsement, and I’m not sure what the useful distinction might be (there are actual distinctions in connotations, the question is whether they have any role to play).
(I guess I am asking to taboo the concept of ownership, as applied to thinking.)
Well… OK.
This is tricky to do in abstract terms without becoming entirely meaningless, so let’s take a step back here and see if a more concrete example helps establish a shared useful framework.
In that vein: what does it mean to say that these fingers I’m typing with are mine, rather than to say they aren’t mine?
Well of course there are lots of ways I own my fingers, but in the sense I think we mean here: roughly speaking, it means that when I form impulses to perform certain tasks with my fingers, those are the fingers that perform the tasks, not some other fingers. When those fingers interact with the external world, my mind receives tactile input, not some other mind. And various other facts along those lines. More broadly, it means that these fingers interact with my intentions and my perceptions in various specific ways.
If that stopped being true, I might still refer to them as my fingers, but I wouldn’t mean quite the same thing by doing so. And if it started being true of other fingers that it currently isn’t true of (e.g., fingers on a prosthetic arm connected to my nervous system) I would probably start referring to those fingers as mine in the same sense. (And if it started being true of arbitrary fingers in unpredictable ways, I would probably eventually discard the concept as useless… no fingers would be especially mine, and all fingers might be mine, and it would just be a silly thing to talk about.)
All of which is so banal as to not be worth saying, but perhaps dropping down to the incredibly banal is a useful place to start, since we seem to be missing each other when we get too abstract.
So, OK, does that align with your understanding of ownership as it applies to fingers in this context? (Of course, it is possible to own fingers in many other ways, but that’s what I usually mean when I talk about my fingers.)
Assuming it does… I would say that when I describe certain thoughts as mine, I mean something similar. When I experience the physical symptoms of anxiety, those are the associated anxious thoughts I experience—not anxious thoughts in some other brain. When I form the desire to remember my grandmother’s first name, the subsequent thought of my grandmother’s first name is my thought, not someone else’s. And so forth.
And, much as with fingers, this seems utterly banal and uninteresting. They are my fingers/thoughts, which labels a certain way of interacting causally with those fingers/thoughts as opposed to other fingers/thoughts.
Is that thing which I just described what you understand “my thought” to denote?
Is it something you expect derives from the concept of endorsement?
If so, can you explain how it does so in your view?
I shall concede that the sentence, “It’s rational for X to believe Y, but really Z” can sometimes make sense—it says that you have different evidence from X. In most cases, though, this will underestimate the power of rationality and ask too little of X. (The last time I can remember saying anything like this was in a strictly fictional context, Chapter 20.)
Isn’t that exactly the question we often ask juries to consider in, for example, liability lawsuits? “It was rational for the defendant to assume (or conclude under the circumstances) X, but in fact not-X, because of Y or because they got really unlucky, and therefore we find them not liable.”
I will happily concede that juries do a poor job accounting for hindsight bias, and hold defendants to low standards of rationality, but it seems to me that the usual question is something like “even though not-X, was it rational to believe X?”
Whether “reasonable” and “rational” really mean the same thing in this case is open, but I submit that it is the same question as whether juries hold defendants to reasonable standards of rationality.